The entire shadow is a texture (as you guessed) applied to a plane that sits just above the decking surface. The texture itself is just a black square, with bluish areas where the lenses would be. The actual shape of the shadow, and the level of tinting projected through the lenses, is controlled by a transparency map. The shape of the texture and trans map were defined by running a quick render with a camera positioned with the same orientation as the light source. The trans map was 2D edited to provide a soft shadow effect.

Rendering this with real shadows would have taken many times longer to render (as it is it took about 8 hours) and the caustics effect could not have been done at all. Manipulating the textured plane to sit correctly was a bit of a fiddle, but as an experiment the concept works reasonably well IMO. I have noticed a couple of minor modelling errors that will need fixing, so a re-render will be required, which should be up in 24 hours or so.

I just started this tonight. I still have alot to do to it and I might not finish by the deadline. I have to much other stuff to do but hopefully I will finish in time. Also this was not rendered in ART. Ill do that when I finish modeling it.

I just fnished my entry, one straightforward render and no post-processing.

Edit : I just popped out and bought a new table

$imon, the reflections are the natural result of the glass material attribute specular/glossy when a simple plane is put in front of it showing the image of a brightly lit window, just like in the real world.

onespirit; thats looking a lot better already! can't wait to see the final render! Just a note for the gold material , maybe you can give it a little bit more reflection, and make the color a bit less yellow! just a thought..

baxter; that looks nice and simple! good use of ART

Thanks neirao!

Ensoniq; great glasses ! the actual glass part is sticking a bit through the frame, but that was probably what you were tlaking about fixing.Because youre using a texture to create the shadow, the shadow is of quite low quality and maybe a bit too smooth at the bottom. Maybe you could try using a higher resolution texture? or mixing the texture with real shadows..

Steve: haha it would be awesome if you could speed it up of course! But i pushed anim8or around a bit too.. 144 AA samples with dielectric materials , a lot of glossy materials and an environmental map around it for reflections.. so its partially my fault

Siragin: Good start! nice style.. i hope we'll get to see an ART render!

Lynn: that looks excellent! How did you create the reflections? The only flaw seems to be the wood texture though, maybe you could scale it down or get a higher resolution texture somewhere?

here is my entry. i created this pair of glasses because of a expresion that herd the other day and i thaught it would be an excellent project to do for this challange. also this is the first time that i used the art raytracer and i am astonished at the results. i beleave that the coke bottle bottom lenses are the best part of the model, the dulled wire didn't turn out so good.

Ensoniq; great glasses ! the actual glass part is sticking a bit through the frame, but that was probably what you were tlaking about fixing.Because youre using a texture to create the shadow, the shadow is of quite low quality and maybe a bit too smooth at the bottom. Maybe you could try using a higher resolution texture? or mixing the texture with real shadows..

Cheers $imon. Yep, the poor lens-to-frame fitment was indeed the issue I was referring to, corrected in the render running at the moment. I agree about the shadow texture. The resolution is reasonably high, at 1000x1000px, but I have resampled it to 1500px square. The main issue is the blurring being incorrect, and not accurately emulating a soft shadow effect. The blur was done manually, using a Gaussian blur effect, and I think I was a bit heavy handed around where the bottom of the frames are resting on the table top. I have reworked the texture considerably, and hopefully the final render will look a bit better.

In theory I like the idea of mixing the baked texture with real shadows, but ART always treats every object as solid and casting shadows, unlike Scanline, so the lenses would cast full shadows. Also, preliminary render tests indicate that the render time would be something like your own 3.5 days, and I just can't spare the time. By comparison the baked shadow method takes about 8 hours to render.

I am working on formalising the method used to create a baked shadow that can incorporate caustics (or a rough simulation of them) to minimise the amount of manual work involved, hopefully making it more a science than an art, so to speak. I won't be able to apply the formal method to this image in time for the comp, but I hope to be able to make up a basic tutorial in the future.

$imon ---I'm not certain what it is you see as objectionable with the "floor" material. It looks to me like it's a ripply, ribbed plastic material, which would naturally break up the reflection, but not necessarily the shadow.